Putin tightens his grip at home

RUSSIA

The Kremlin is escalating internet restrictions and surveillance amid growing fears over dissent and instability – but the crackdown may also expose new vulnerabilities in Russia’s economy and communications infrastructure.

VLADIMIR Putin has entered a desperate race to tighten his grip on Russia’s internet, as the Kremlin seeks to shield itself from dissent, outside influence and the destabilising pressures of a long war.

But in attempting to centralise control over the internet, communications and online platforms, Moscow may also be creating fresh weaknesses of its own.

A new Sibylline Situation Update Brief warns that Russia has intensified censorship, surveillance and telecom controls over the last six months, with the Federal Security Service (FSB) taking a larger role in enforcing what the Kremlin calls its “sovereign internet” strategy.

The Kremlin increasingly sees the internet as a security battleground. Its aim, analysts warn, is to replicate aspects of China’s censorship model while reviving levels of state control not seen since the Soviet era.

“Social stability and domestic stability is definitely one of the top priorities of the regime at this stage,” says Karan Vassil, Sibylline’s Eurasia Intelligence Analyst and lead author of the report.

“The Kremlin is obsessed with this.”

Russia has sought greater control over the internet for years, but the war in Ukraine and growing fears over domestic instability have dramatically accelerated the Kremlin’s efforts.

Unlike China, which built its digital censorship architecture in the early stages of the internet era, Russia spent much of the 1990s in a period of relative openness and digital freedom.

“The 90s was a period of significant internet freedom,” Vassil says. “Technically, it is much more difficult” for Russia to impose comprehensive digital controls now.

A crucial turning point came after the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack near Moscow in March 2024, which Russian authorities linked to Telegram. The aftermath accelerated a shift within the FSB itself.

Responsibility for digital restrictions reportedly moved away from more technical security departments toward the FSB’s Second Service, the branch focused on constitutional stability and suppressing dissent.

“That service is in charge of protecting the constitutional system, so basically ensuring domestic stability and suppressing any discontent and opposition to the regime,” Vassil says.

The result has been a far more systematic approach to tightening state control over online communications.

Among the most visible measures has been the crackdown on messaging applications and VPNs. WhatsApp is now effectively inaccessible in Russia without circumvention tools, while Telegram has faced mounting restrictions despite its widespread use among ordinary Russians, pro-war groups and parts of the Russian military.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov issued a rare public rebuke of the restrictions, comparing them to attempts by Iran to curb the platform.

“Restricting citizens’ freedom is never the right answer,” he said.

The measures are already beginning to affect ordinary commerce and business activity across Russia, where messaging platforms have become deeply embedded in daily economic life.

Businesses, freelancers and grey-market traders rely on Telegram and WhatsApp for payments, logistics and customer communication.

Telegram has become deeply embedded not only in Russian society, but also in military and cyber operations linked to the war in Ukraine. According to Vassil, restrictions on the platform have already affected battlefield coordination.

“Telegram has proven essential for Russian command and control,” he says.

Sibylline cyber analyst Denise Schipani says Telegram remains widely used in military coordination, phishing operations and information warfare linked to the conflict.

“It actually hits assets quite widely,” she says. “Not just from a military perspective.”

Despite the tightening restrictions, Schipani believes some state-linked actors will likely retain privileged access where operationally necessary, similar to systems seen in China.

The Kremlin is also seeking to centralise and localise digital infrastructure inside Russia, reducing dependence on foreign systems while expanding state oversight of communications.

“One of the things that Russia is trying to do is locate external servers to Russia in order to block IP addresses,” Schipani says.

Yet the drive for centralisation may also carry significant risks.

One of the report’s most striking conclusions is that concentrating telecom infrastructure among a handful of state-linked providers could reduce the resilience of Russia’s communications ecosystem in the face of outages or cyber attacks.

Historically, Russia’s decentralised internet infrastructure provided redundancy and resilience. Consolidation risks reversing that.

“The more centralised infrastructure becomes, the more damage a single successful attack can cause,” Schipani says.

“If one goes down, then you have the other ones, which obviously allows for better resilience. The more centralised it is, the more likely it is that you will be able to impact a wider range of things.”

Schipani says the rollout itself also reveals the limitations of Russian state capacity. Software deployments have been delayed, infrastructure upgrades uneven and censorship inconsistent from region to region.

“In some areas, for example, you’ll be able to access YouTube, whereas in some other areas you won’t be able to access it,” she says. “It’s very fragmented in the way that it’s being implemented.”

For the Kremlin, however, the tightening of digital controls is not simply about censorship. It is also about reinforcing a broader political narrative that has underpinned Putin’s rule for more than two decades: that strong state control is preferable to instability, fragmentation and chaos.

While modern Russia differs sharply from the USSR technologically, Vassil says the direction of travel increasingly resembles a return to Soviet-style surveillance and internal control.

As wartime pressures mount and economic disruption grows, many Russians may become increasingly frustrated with restrictions while remaining reluctant to challenge the system underpinning them.

the measures are unlikely to pose an immediate threat to Putin’s grip on power, however.

One challenge for the Kremlin is that Russians have already experienced periods of openness and freedom following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Putin’s response is to frame the freedoms of the 1990s as inseparable from economic collapse, corruption and social turmoil.

“As long as the Kremlin can show that it is avoiding a return to the chaos of the 1990s,” says Vassil, “it will be able to maintain social stability.”

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